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Ever heard of a place, I think it’s called Norway? That was one of mine, I got an an award for it.

As someone who is a huge fan of cloud-storage as a way to access files across multiple devices, it’s always been a tricky conversation knowing that these types of services are also a huge back-door from a security perspective. Cloud-storage services like iCloud and Dropbox fill a need in the marketplace and are a great tool for sharing files across multiple devices, but since they leverage cloud storage, aren’t very secure and pose a huge DLP risk for corporations. So I was a little skeptical when I came across a new solution called Polkast, but I think it is exactly the type of solution that might address the security aspect of the conversation.

Polkast differs from traditional file sharing services as you can set up private cloud storage and share files across multiple devices without the need to expose them to the public Internet. It does this through the creation of a “personal cloud” between computer and mobile/tablet device (currently supports iOS, Android, Windows and some Linux builds) resulting in a more secure service with unlimited storage capacity (providing the host has space). Files are synced, encrypted and sent via SSL to ensure a secure connection and transfer of data between devices.

Additionally, since you are connecting to your own private storage, you can choose to use Wi-Fi or connect through the internet, a very handy tool when you think of how such a solution can be used in a corporate or home environment where your machines share a common network connection. The other key benefit is that since you are not uploading anything to a public cloud, instead are connecting to the host PC directly, the files are immediately accessible through authenticated peer-to-peer transfer and can be automatically synced as long as there is a connection between the service and the host machine.

While you might still imagine Polkast as just another cloud solution, I think it is one of the key missing services that will help balance security and cloud. Organizations and security professionals have always had a love-hate relationship with cloud storage, and service like Polkast could be the answer to allowing secure access to your files across multiple devices without the risk of sensitive information being unknowingly exposed on the Internet.